Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Jewish Sources on Electronics and Shabbat

Next week I'm teaching in our synagogue Ritual Committee about issues relating to the use of electronics on Shabbat, particularly in connection with conducting services. Since I'm gathering source material I thought I would post for everyone the raw material from the Conservative movement.

There are certain basic concepts of halacha (Jewish law) that are important backdrop:

• m'lacha -- usually understood as creative, durable labor forbidden on Shabbat by the Torah
• avot m'lacha -- overarcing categories of m'lacha, of which there are 39
• tol'dot m'lacha -- derivative types of m'lacha, subsets of analogies to the 39 avot m'lacha
• ha-koteiv -- the one who writes (one of the 39)
• mi-d'oraita/d'oraita -- a law derived directly from the Torah (oraita is Aramaic for Torah)
• mi'drabbanan/d'rabbanan -- a law enacted by the rabbis of the Mishnah, often to keep people away from violating a Torah law
• sh'vut -- activities other than m'lacha that detract from the restfulness of Shabbat
• uv'din d'chol -- actions/activities associated with weekday time
• p'sik reishei v'lo... -- "he cut off its head; wouldn't...." a (colorful) metaphor for the concept of "double effect", actions that are done with one intention but have a likely second result
• muk'tzeh -- set off or set aside; objects that one should not touch because their major use is for m'lacha
• sh'at had'chak -- a pressing time or emergency/exigent situation

Some sources: RabbI Nevins, Rabbi Heller, and Rabbi Reisner are the most contemporary papers in terms of the technology they reference, though some of the older analysis is applicable still.

• Rabbi Daniel Nevins, "The Use of Electrical and Electronic Devices on Shabbat." (2012). This is a long survey with a good table of contents about conceptual and then specific issues. Electronics specifically are discussed in the ha-koteiv section starting on p. 30.
• Rabbi Gordon Tucker, "The Use of a Remote Audio/Video Monitor on Shabbat and Yom Tov" (1989)
• Rabbis Elliot Dorff and Gordon Tucker, "On Recording Shabbat and Yom Tov Services" (1989)
• Rabbi Joshua Heller, "Streaming Services on Shabbat and Yom Tov" (2020)
• Rabbi Avram Israel Reisner, "Zoom is Not the Way: A Dissent to 'Streaming Services on Shabbat and Yom Tov'" (2020)

Though not on the specific issue of Shabbat, essential reading about what does or does not make an electronic minyan is Rabbi Avram Israel Reisner, "Wired to the Kadosh Barukh Hu: Minyan via Internet" (2001).

Torah for This Week's Reading

Here are a few of my pieces related to this week's reading in the Torah on the first days of the Exodus, escaping from Pharaoh and crossing the Sea and heading into the desert toward Mt. Sinai:

What Is a Miracle? (why miracles are not about natural/supernatural but the relation of real/ideal)

Why Exodus Is the Most Important Book of All Time

Hope (about finding Joseph's bones)

 

Remembering Debbie Friedman on Her 10th Yahrzeit

I gave this D'var Torah on Saturday morning, January 23, on the Shabbat before Debbie Friedman's 10th yahrzeit.

On a Sunday night in early January 25 years ago, Laurie and I were living in Queens and there was a big Nor’easter brewing. Some of you may remember, it came all the way up here – it shut down New York City for several days. We had tickets to a concert at Carnegie Hall and decided to go anyway. This was before we had kids, but even so we wouldn’t usually go out late on a night before a work day. We got to our seats way up in who knows which balcony, and the performer came out on stage and said, “Welcome to Beth Carnegie!” And for the next couple of hours Debbie Friedman turned Carnegie Hall into a shul, into camp, into a Jewish revival. Debbie, zichronah liv’racha, is the composer and singer who gave us Misheberach, L'chi Lach, the ya-la-la-la-s of Havdalah, I Am a Latke – just for some examples. This coming week we will remember Debbie’s 10th yahrzeit.

At Beth Carnegie in 1996 Debbie had on stage her sign language interpreter EJ Cohen, who lives in New Hampshire and who I met years later up here. Were any of you there by chance? After it was over, Laurie and I went to the backstage door. The snow was already really coming down but we wanted to say hi to Debbie before she left, the way you’d go out to try to get an autograph from a Broadway star.

We wanted to talk to her because the Savetts have a connection to Debbie Friedman’s family that may be unique, as surely we are the only two Jewish families who have settled in both Utica, New York and St. Paul, Minnesota. Debbie was an alum of my alma mater, Highland Park Senior High School in St. Paul -- Debbie and Jack Morris, major league pitcher (they would have just missed each other there).

Growing up, Debbie was involved in the youth program at Mt. Zion, the large Reform congregation in St. Paul whose legacy includes Rabbi Gunther Plaut, editor of the Reform movement chumash. In the mid-1960s Mt. Zion started encouraging kids to go to Jewish summer camp at Olin Sang Ruby in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, and before twelfth grade Debbie went back to New York State in the summer to the NFTY Song and Dance Leaders Institute at Kutz Camp. The next year, right out of high school, Debbie was in Israel on Kibbutz; she was leading music for Mt. Zion’s youth group and religious school; she was regional and national songleader for NFTY; and she was back at Kutz on the staff of the Song Leader Institute.

Cantor Jeff Klepper, composer of our Shalom Rav melody, met Debbie that summer of ’69. He was 15 and remembers a charismatic musician, age 19 and about the same size as her 12-string Martin guitar. He says that Debbie was already a celebrity at camp that summer and the best song leader on the staff, the most effective teacher.

This was the time in her life when Debbie was beginning to compose. She didn’t formally study music; she never learned to read music, but she was a sponge for all kinds of songs, particularly folk music both American and Israeli. You can hear Peter, Paul and Mary in a lot of Debbie’s early music, and later Peter Yarrow himself got to know her and said that Debbie was like Mary.

The Savetts always got Debbie’s early vinyl hot off the press, and her records became part of our Friday night ritual at home. We would eat our Shabbat dinner, and sing out the songbooks we pilfered from Herzl Camp, where Dad was the doctor for a week during the summer and we’d get to eat with camp and absorb songs and ruach. I was just in elementary school when these traditions began. After dinner we’d go into the den and put on a Debbie album. The first one, Sing Unto God, was basically a whole Friday night service. She recorded it with the high school chorus from our alma mater as her backup singers. They helped her debut the songs in a presentation at Mt. Zion. That album contained among pieces her quickly-famous Sh’ma.

I don’t remember really meeting Debbie as a young kid that much. She was more than 15 years older than me and I knew she was a big deal. I remember stopping by the Friedman home from time to time with my parents, and seeing her parents Frieda and Gabe and her sister Cheryl. When I would go to camp and we would sing Debbie's first Mi Chamocha or Im Tirtzu, I always felt a little less homesick.

Debbie did something within her first few years of creating that no one else had done before. She bridged camp and Temple. She made the same music the music of both. She wasn’t the first to set traditional Jewish words in a pop or folk style. This was just a few years after Tom Lehrer had already made fun of the 1960s attempts to make worship hip and young in his song “The Vatican Rag.”

But Debbie was the first to make that music work on the bimah. I remember going to Mt. Zion from time to time and hearing there the melodies I knew from our living room, and the music worked even in a Sanctuary that was cavernous, with the very formal cantor and the robes and the bimah up high and the organ. I’m sure being a home-town talent made a difference, but it wasn’t just in Minnesota that her music was catching on. And remember that Debbie started doing this as a woman at a time when the Hebrew Union College had still not ordained a female rabbi or cantor.

I think there are a few reasons Debbie was the one to pave the way of synthesis between camp and Temple, between stand-alone creativity and conventional prayer services. First of all, Debbie was like Mozart. She was a young prodigy, so soulful and so creative but in a tight frame that people could come to recognize and assimilate, that stretched them just the right amount. There’s something familiar across her many generative years. You can hear certain kinds of intervals over and over -- Oseh Shalom, the tears may fall but we’ll hear them call,v’im lo achshav, and the women dancing with their timbrels. Or the same thing in a slightly different mode -- While we’re here in Hebrew School, samekh ayin pay fay…. Oseh shalom – hear it? Those are bits of different kinds of songs from over a twenty year span, but there’s something threading through. She had a few patterns like that she reworked over and over. Each new Debbie album was like getting together with an old friend to catch up and then settling in to hear about her latest adventure in some new part of the world.

You don’t hear anything quite like Debbie’s signature vocal motifs in anyone else’s music, but still anyone can sing or lead a Debbie song. She doesn’t make you go up high to notes you can’t reach, or throw in a bridge that only one person in the group can do. Debbie had plenty of range in her voice, but she mostly sang to us in our range. And when she herself was in front of a group Debbie never did what a James Taylor or a Peter Yarrow does from time to time, vary up a familiar song to make this performance different from another. It was different because the moment was different and she was in the moment with your particular group. Maybe this time she’d sing faster or slower, maybe change the instrumentation, but she never made herself superior to you when she was singing to you or leading you. Not in a concert at a synagogue, or at a Reform movement convention or at CAJE, and not even at Carnegie Hall. Debbie’s songs and their experience were something she was giving to you, so they would belong to you. Her music sounds great if a great cantor sings it, if a choir sings it -- if you sing it.

Debbie packed a lot of Hebrew words into her music. This is the opposite of the niggun approach of repeating a few words, and it was a bit of a counterculture to the art of English in the New Union Prayerbook. She figured out how to make you want to know the Hebrew rather than be scared off by it. Her music was the spoonful of sugar; not sugary (or very occasionally) but more like honey with fragrances that get around the barriers your conscious brain might put up. She did plenty in English too, liturgical and educational – but she came to want to study the original texts and she would return again and again to certain words, like the Song of Songs or Mi Chamocha.

Debbie didn’t create new theological language, but she translated the new metaphors others were teaching and brilliantly made them hearable. While we rabbis began struggling with how to say “God of our forefathers and our foremothers” or “God of our ancestors”, Debbie came up with “Who blessed the ones before us.” She started out using the language of the traditional Reform prayerbook in all its gender-not-neutral formal English – “And Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with all thy heart” – and eventually she went back and revised some of her own early songs in English. Her Renewal of Spirit album of healing prayers included many that address God very directly and traditionally as “You.” Don’t hide your face from me, I’m asking for your help. Instead of theology, just the real moment of prayer.

Debbie never made herself a celebrity or even a personality outside of her music. In public she taught and narrated through her concerts, and she loved the teaching process up close with musicians and students and in big groups, but she didn’t ask you to listen to a story of her personal experience as the price of connecting. I think it was only much later in her life that people outside her circle knew of the physical ailments she was struggling with. Laurie and I heard her in Atlanta about ten years after Carnegie Hall, in a synagogue just a few years before she died, and it was obvious she wasn’t herself but she didn’t talk about that. Debbie helped give voice to Jewish feminism and some of the spiritual revival from the 1990s onward, but she wasn’t an activist outside of the music itself. The most activist thing was the women’s Seder that her music has become so central to.

For the Jews of North America, Debbie Friedman stands where only Naomi Shemer, Reb Shlomo Carlebach, and Ehud Manor stand.

For me the most important Debbie music is from her third album called Ani Ma’amin, put out in 1976. She created it as she was working with a group just out of high school at Camp Olin Sang Ruby, and the cover has a picture of Debbie sitting on rocks by a lake looking out. The Savett home probably listened to this one the most of all on Shabbat evenings through my junior and senior high years.

Debbie wrote on the jacket about the meaning of “I believe in the coming of the Messiah”, the gaps between dreams and visions and reality, but the music sounds like all the dreams are real and the visions have come to pass. We all mostly know Ani Ma’amin as a somber Shoah melody, but Debbie’s was the first melody I ever knew for this, and it’s entirely different.

That album’s interpretation of Shabbat is that the rest we need isn’t an escape, a break from a world too broken, but a transport to a world where everything true is just real, without effort. That’s what the album sounds like. A world where God’s Torah and love are just there on any given day and it’s no question they will always be – V’ahavatcha al tasir mimenu l’olamim, Baruch Atah Adonai, Ohev Amo Yisrael. And Your love will never move from us, not ever – Blessed are You, Adonai, Who loves Your people Israel.

As we mark ten years without Debbie Friedman’s live voice, may we take to heart what she gave us to say every week: Help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing. Debbie’s voice in our minds and on our recordings, and our voices singing what Debbie gave us -- may they always be a blessing.

Let's Hear It For Article 1!

As our focus is on the inauguration, I don’t want to lose sight of our representatives in Congress. Americans in our spirit of action are drawn to the president, as we are seem to value people who act more than those who deliberate. But I’ve found myself the past few years becoming more and more an Article 1 guy. For me the Capitol is sacred space more than the White House.

In part this is because I’ve met my own U.S. Senators and Representatives, and I’ve been in their office suites and the Capitol itself. I’ve never been at the White House or met a president. And despite the presence of plenty of people in the state and national legislatures whom I don’t admire, and others I don’t agree with – I’m still very Mr.-Smith-y about Congress. Our many elected representatives from all over are what makes this a republic, at least as much as our single elected president.

Part of what the Capitol mob attacked was the dignity of our Senators and Representatives. I worry that the images of invaders in the chambers, sitting in the chair’s seat, make the members seem small and powerless. As I said, American prize action and the very incomplete idea of leadership as the person out in front, and we love or hate those people but we pay attention and assume their power. Appreciating those who deliberate in groups, who decide what others will execute, who oversee and keep watch on them – that’s an acquired democratic taste.

We should acquire that taste.

There’s a reason Article 1 comes before Article 2 in our Constitution. There should be an aura to being an elected official, even as they should be people of the people. Just as our attention is naturally drawn to the president, we should train ourselves to pay attention to our representatives as well.

I have been fortunate in my years in New Hampshire to be represented in both the Senate and the House by members in both parties who have been people of substance. Those I voted for and those I didn’t. I’ve been in offices of Democrats and Republicans, talking both domestic and foreign policy, sometimes with the member and sometimes with staff. At least one member sat in my office as a candidate, and others have been in the our synagogue as candidates and sitting Senators and U.S. Representatives. I have lobbied them, agreed with them, argued with them.

I admire them and their roles more because I don’t think I could ever be a legislator myself. Even though I love to discuss and deliberate. Maybe at the city of school board level, but I couldn’t imagine myself as a legislator beyond that in any capital. It could be that in my role as a rabbi I’ve come to love having authority mixed in with policy deliberation. In any case, those who know how to be good legislators have a special set of virtues and skills – for research and thinking, for listening and motivating and collaborating, for passing their work on to others. These are so important, and not a little countercultural.

So let’s hear it for Article 1, and thank you to those who are serving as our democratically elected representatives. We celebrate you, as the new president comes in front of your house and ours to take his oath tomorrow.

Sukkat Shalom -- What a Temporary Peace Is (And Is Not)

I am posting this just after seeing that the U.S. House has voted to impeach President Trump for his actions leading to the violence at the Capitol one week ago. This is from the D'var Torah I gave on the Shabbat of Shmini Atzeret, the end of the festival of Sukkot, Saturday, October 10, 2020. This was a few weeks before Election Day. It is a charge about peace during the difficult time that was coming and that continues in this country. I drew out how the symbols and rituals connected to "Sukkat Shalom" (a temporary shelter of peace) might guide us. We are still in a time that requires the kind of Shalom-making I describe here. That Shalom is more than avoidance, and it has a moral and spiritual cost even though it is an imperative. This is not all I have to say today and in the coming days.

What’s next for us after our holy season in 5781 is the election season of 2020…. My own week of Sukkot has been about contemplating Sukkat Shalom, Sukkot as a training about peace.

The Geonim taught that the blessing over Lulav and Etrog is said each morning of Sukkot right after the blessings of peace that conclude the Amidah – the Birkat Kohanim(the priestly blessing of peace), Sim Shalom, Oseh Shalom.

They taught that we need to accumulate blessings of peace on the way to Lulav and Etrog, because the ritual involves four species that are so different and distant and hard to put together into one. Our tradition takes the four species to represent vastly different kinds of people. Palm, citron, myrtle and willow have smell and taste, or one or the other, or neither one at all. The midrash compares this to how Jews come in different combinations – those with great Torah and great mitzvot (deeds), those with great Torah and few mitzvot, those with great mitzvot but little Torah, those with very little or none of either. Holding the four species together in one bundle is about the difficulty of holding together such a group. Four species that don’t by their nature automatically come together.

In that bundle, the Etrog looks like the heart. It has both a beautiful fragrance and a sharp taste – just as those with both Torah wisdom and goodness are the heart of a community. But the community is the whole bundle. The four species are so different and have different logics to how they live, and we are commanded to bring them together in one bundle of peace. Not a surface peace, but a challenging and dynamic one, a peace that has to be demonstrated each day of Sukkot. A peace that requires effort, working your way by concentrating on constant reminders of what Shalom could be.  You cannot fulfill the mitzvah of Lulav unless the bundle is one you yourself have acquired. There’s no shortcut – you cannot use a stolen Lulav in Jewish law. You cannot have peace without acquiring it legitimately. There is no shortcut. You cannot have peace without actually wrestling with difference and division in the logics of how people live.

In the coming month until Election Day, and a period of time to follow, a fundamental imperative will be Shalom – peace that is dynamic, acquired, recognizing difference and tension, built around Torah and righteous action. Difficult peace.

At the heart of this will be anyone willing to be like an Etrog. A heart connected to what seem like different species, to people who are strong in wisdom and knowledge, and who are weak in them; to people who are strong in actions of goodness, and who are weak in them.

How fascinating that the Torah did not ask us to take a sweeter fruit instead. The Etrog, the heart, has to announce the fragrance it has, and it has to challenge with the sharp taste it has. The Etrog is held next to the Lulav, the palm that draws its strength from deep sources, from deep water that is true no matter what storms are in the sky or not in the coming season, no matter what water is flowing on the surface or not.

I am wearing this kippah today, the one with the Jewish star and the American flag, and will continue to wear it daily through the election and beyond. My nation, my values, my community. The Shalom imperative of this next period is something I am taking on along with other clergy leaders in our area. Hareini m’kabel alai – we take it on for our congregations and for this Nashua area.

This month and the next few are not going to be the months when we reach the long-term and deep solutions we need in America. We are not going to solve the issues of justice and suffering while we are voting, and counting votes, and in the waiting period that might follow. We are not going to be able to get to work on long-term solutions in the period right after the election is settled while many people are hurt and confused and disoriented and angry, which will be the case for more people than ever, even more than today, no matter who wins.

So as we take down our ritual Sukkot, we need to build another kind of Sukkat Shalom, a temporary and fragile Sukkah held up by those who are committed to peace on many levels – to nonviolent responses, to reaching out even to those who are deficient in Torah or deficient in good deeds or deficient in both. To speak to and draw out more of any Torah they have, any good deeds they have. This is a Sukkat Shalom we will need to hold up for a period of time but not for longer than necessary, to enable us to walk truly into a new American year, a new phase in this country.

We will hold it up, myself and my clergy colleagues and any of you who choose to join in this work. We will hold it up as a shelter, as a house of Sarah and Avraham where any can talk who is willing to talk, even if you are not ready yet to talk toward agreement. We will hold it up as a Sanctuary, for anyone who needs a quiet and safe place to pray or reflect or for any who are disoriented. This place here where I am standing, and other churches in our community, will be those shelters of Shalom.

Our clergy will hold up a Sukkah of peace in the public square, on Main Street and in the papers, by calling publicly for nonviolence before and after the election. We will do what we did four years ago in our Men’s Club political breakfast, when I got a commitment from then-Senator Ayotte and now-Senator Hassan to meet a group of us two days after the election to make a public show of Shalom. We have begun to approach the authorities in Nashua to offer ourselves, because we need to prepare and we need our authorities to be prepared. One spark in the wrong place can cause things to get out of hand. We need people of Shalom to be driving the response to any conflict we have, not people of violence.

A time that elevates peace above other things for a time means assuming responsibility for those whose suffering will not be addressed in the period of Sukkat Shalom. The suffering because of COVID-19 and around racial injustice is not distributed evenly, and calling for peace first means taking responsibility for delaying what many people need. So I and my clergy colleagues need to back that up with a commitment to stand up for those bearing the brunt nonetheless, and to make sure that peace is not an excuse to push off everything else indefinitely. A Sukkah that can stand for too long is no longer a kosher Sukkah. Already, the conflicts in our society that have pushed off the moral imperatives of our day give us much to repent for.

And if in this time of seeking peace any group is targeted for intimidation or worse, the Sukkat Shalom must shelter and protect them, and not trade them for a false peace. That could be us, by the way, who are targeted – Jews generally; members of our community who are people of color or LGBTQ+ or immigrants. People will stand by us if that happens and we need to stand up for others.

Shalom means lifting up the example of those leaders who embody a true solidarity. We need those models, especially in our political leaders. It has fallen too hard on local leaders to be the only figures of such solidarity.

Shalom means holding to account those who advocate policies we want but who are themselves divisive. It means asking those we know on the other side politically to do the same when they point the finger only our way.

So I will wear this kippah to show this commitment to Shalom. In this spirit I have been reaching out and will continue to do so – to fellow religious leaders in the area who are my longtime partners and my emerging ones, to leaders of groups I do not have relationships so deep with, to leaders of groups whose vulnerability I worry about. To members of this congregation whose commitments I respect and admire, to members of this congregation who express themselves politically with whom I am solidarity even though we do not have the same outlook on social questions of the day.

We will need in the coming months some backing off and cooling off, and some compromise, and those will be the right thing at times as long as we don’t mistake them for the truest Shalom. They will not last on their own. They haven’t until now. We have tried too long in America to find Shalom only by cooling off and compromising and pushing off until later.

But real Shalom is not avoidant and it is not shallow. It is not the lowest common denominator.

Peace comes only through people who are like the Etrog -- who probe their deeds and probe their Torah, who have both an inviting fragrance and a sharp flavor, who know that even a fruit that is beautiful has to be cultivated again and again.

The America we need will not come from violence, nor will it come from avoiding conflict.  It will come in the period following a Sukkat Shalom, a dynamic and hard peace held up by those who will step forward and actively hold it.

I hope that my fears and preparations are overblown and not so needed – that the worst we have is unhappiness this month and next, not outright conflict – but the preparation is good no matter what. Though my words are solemn, I speak them in the same hope I taught on Rosh Hashanah: seeing myself and others step up in worthwhile action on behalf of people we care about, including you and others.

I shall keep wearing this kippah. As we turn to Yizkor (memorial prayers), I will reach to the example of ancestors who faced challenges as serious as the ones we do and pray that their merits will inspire and bless us, as we finally step out of Elul and Tishrei into the year it is our destiny to build for our country.

A New Page -- USA

I just finished the first version of a new page on my site, which I'm calling simply "USA". It has sources and mostly my own reflections about American politics, racial justice, anti-Semitism, and political leadership. I will be updating it with the best links I want people to know about, and anything good I generate as well.

It feels healing particularly today to look back on things I have written, said, and done out of my faith in this country and its politics. Rather than focus only on today's troubles, I am trying to be drawn toward MLK Day.

Rolling Waters, Mighty Stream -- Exploring MLK's Metaphor

This was my opening invocation for the annual Southern NH Outreach for Black Unity Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast on January 21, 2019.

I am so honored to be invited to join you for some opening words today. My name is Jon Spira-Savett, and I serve as rabbi for the Jewish community in our area through Temple Beth Abraham in Nashua. I’m a member of the executive board of the Nashua Area Interfaith Council and one of its recent past presidents, and it’s because of that network that I have met many of you.

Rev. King is one of my own most important religious teachers. I call him Rev. King because though he was Dr. King, a scholar and theologian, he was a pastor and a preacher and a teacher, for his own communities and for my community, the Jewish community of America.

Rev. King’s voice in our nation, and his many visits to synagogues and rabbinic conventions, inspired and mobilized people in the Jewish community, from college students to older rabbis. He inspired many in the Jewish community to march with him in Alabama, to travel down to Mississippi in that Freedom Summer, to work the pressure points in Congress for civil rights. There is even a story of a rabbi or two running into a Midwestern Senator at the airport in 1964, just by chance, quote-unquote, having been tipped off about where to find a man trying to hide out and to remind him there was no hiding from a vote for justice.

And the last interview of Rev. King’s life took place at the national convention of the Rabbinical Assembly, just ten days before he was taken from all of us. There Rev. King spoke a verse from the prophet Amos that you have heard from him many times: Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Let justice
roll down
like waters
and righteousness like a mighty
stream.

Rev. King had preached those words in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and he had written them to send to religious leaders from his cell in Birmingham Jail, and he would preach these words of Amos again the night before he was killed, in Memphis. In front of the rabbis Rev. King didn’t preach them, he said them soberly, as quiet as he had ever said them, as he was in a tough time – let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

What was it about these particular words from Amos? I could read you fifty other equally beautiful verses about the virtue of justice, the glory of righteousness. But these words.

First of all, Rev. King was saying that justice is a power as natural as gravity, which just pulls the water down from the mountains into any place that is not already raised high. Justice is built in; it’s the hardware of our system. Just as gravity can take something small, and the longer it moves down, the more force it gathers, the harder it is to stop – so too justice can take any single person, any group no matter how small, and make them unstoppable.

In the verses before this one, Amos was talking about the so-called power of oppressors, all the work they have to do to twist justice, to feast on bribes, to take what they have not earned, to look away from the poor and drive them out of their community. The hard work it takes to look so pious and religious, when you are complicit in so much injustice.

Amos is saying: That so-called power -- that’s what’s unnatural. That kind of power is a wearying power, a power that spends itself and takes us constantly away from the Divine and from one another.

So why does that power seem so real? Because the verse from Amos really says that justice swells like waters -- like a rolling wave at the edge of the sea, like the piling up of the waters at the bottom of a waterfall – and behind that surge is an emptiness, an undertow, until the next wave.  A depression where the so-called power of the so-called powerful can slip in.

So when Rev. King spoke about justice rolling down like waters, he meant that we have to get down from up high where we see things so clearly but we are smaller than we could be, and we have to roll together and make ourselves more powerful. We have to plunge down together so we can surge together, and we have to keep grouping up and keep on coming, to leave no time after one wave of justice until another, no lull that makes it easier for the other so-called power to just slide in there. When I said yes that I would presume to stand in front of you and say some words, it is because I wanted to tell you that I am tired of being a small wave and seeing small waves, and I want to be with you and roll and surge together. Let justice roll down like waters.

And as for the mighty stream, there is only other place in the Hebrew Bible where that particular phrase occurs and it will knock you out. It’s in a remarkable law in the book of Deuteronomy that happened to be the text at my Bar Mitzvah, so I’ve never forgotten it.

Deuteronomy talks about the case of a dead body found in a field between towns, and no one knows who is responsible. The elders of each of the surrounding towns are required to measure from the body to the edge of their town. Whichever town is closest, the elders of that town have to take a pure young calf, one that has never pulled a yoke, and bring it to a mighty stream that has never been worked or tilled – a stream that is mighty only during the rainy season, when it gushes with water from the heavens that overflows onto terraces and fields, and the rest of the time is just the memory of a mighty stream, or the hope for one to come.

And there the elders wash their hands and sacrifice the calf, and they lead a call and response. The later rabbis of my tradition say the gist of what they say, back and forth to each other, is this: We, the leaders of the town closest to here, we swear that this man did not pass through our town without anyone noticing. We swear that in our town it’s not possible that no one offered him a place to stay, or a meal to eat, or protection when he was ready to leave and go out into the dangerous world. For if we had failed in any of those ways, then it would be as if we had killed him ourselves, and his blood would be on our hands.

This particular mighty stream was hiding in the background every time Rev. King preached from Amos. It’s the stream where the elders of the city go down together to ask: Have we been responsible for every person, every single person – or have we washed our hands and just pretended that our righteousness is flowing like a mighty stream?

Have we been responsible for every person we don’t know personally, but we know she is here, he is here, yet still isolated from the rest of us, and we let that be all right?

Have we been responsible for education in every school, have we been responsible for dignified housing in every neighborhood, have we made it clear that no one can be bullied or harassed by another kid or by someone in authority because of how they look or how they speak, or where they were born, or who and how they love?

Have we been responsible not just to run after problems righteously, but to build the community that can sustain and love every person who passes our way?

Maybe we are the elders who ought to go down to the river, to the mighty stream that runs just a few hundred feet from here, maybe every year right around Martin Luther King Day, and see who else is there and ask these questions.

I believe Rev. King would say to us that the very same stream, the same place, can be a place of sorrow, or it can be flowing mightily with righteousness. All it takes is for us to be those leaders who gather there, who between us blend the wisdom of elders who have seen it all, the sweep of history and the big picture, with the freshness that comes from seeing people one at a time in dark corners. The mighty stream is a place for leaders who come for rituals that rivet us, and words that drive us, with measuring sticks of analysis and loving eyes. The mighty stream is a place for all of us, and not just on this one day a year.

Let justice roll down, like waters
and righteousness, like a mighty
stream.

These are words to hear preached in hope; and these are words to say soberly in difficult times. There is a hydropower in justice, and it is time for us to generate it together, to harness our power together.  

Holy One of love and mystery, known to us by many names, or by no name at all – we pray that we will be blessed by the memory of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who taught us how to be sisters and brothers, to be colleagues and teachers for each other in justice and righteousness, to be the leaders we need with each other and for each other. Amen.

Synagogue Collaboration -- The Next Level

One of the great surprises of the pandemic has been a new kind of sustained, intense collaboration among Jewish professionals based in synagogues. 

Denominational networks, cohort programs such as those from the Center for Rabbinic Innovation, and sharing platforms like JEDLAB and eJewish Philanthropy are one part of the story. Something more bottom-up happened between Pesach and Rosh Hashanah as well, especially among professionals in synagogues across North America. “Dreaming Up High Holy Days 5781” began on Facebook not long after Pesach, and quickly almost 2,800 colleagues gathered there. In addition to a clearinghouse, it became a venue for creating together. Certain ideas shared and developed there quickly became almost the norm for synagogues on Rosh Hashanah – signing up for private time in Sanctuaries, outdoor mass Shofar gatherings. The Jew It At Home collaborative of forty-plus partners, mostly synagogues, has been bringing Jewish learning and experiences to participants all over the world every day. 

If we had been there for each other for the difficult first months, and helped each other reengineer everything from scratch through these first collaborations – dayenu. 

What if there could be more?  

There is an opportunity now for collaboration that could be sustainable for professionals and institutions, and transformational both for institutions and the life of Jews in our synagogues. Not just temporarily during the pandemic – getting us through Purim and Pesach 2021 and the long transition back -- but once it is safe to be together entirely. 

We know that collaboration can be both time-consuming and rewarding. Time-consuming: more e-blasts to set aside and sift through later (or not), more posts on social media to sift through, more webinars on offer. Rewarding: improving our own work, knowing we’re not alone, discovering new joys of colleagueship.  

There is a world where we simply treat the new resources and colleagues we’ve discovered this year the way we have always treated programs, speakers, curricula, and denominational networks out there. Available when it’s convenient, ad hoc, supplemental to our core work. 

But for some of us, again that’s not enough. Either we’ve been itching to reengineer our synagogues and our own professional lives for a long time, or the pandemic has urged that itch onto us. Pursuing collaborations at a more energetic level could be the key to the transformations we seek or have been advocating. Particularly for smaller or medium-sized congregations, but by no means limited to them. 

Is this what you are looking for? You are if you believe these three statements: 

1. I believe that people in my community would benefit if I could consistently bring them Torah beyond my own or that of my institution. 
2. I believe that people in my community would benefit if the best of my work were not limited or bottlenecked by my own capacity and workload. \
3. I believe my own Torah, my soul, or my leadership would reach a new level if I were working closely and in coordination with others rooted somewhere else.  

What It Could Look Like 

Imagine any of the following, among a group of anywhere from two to five synagogues. 

1. Collaborations that synergize teachers or prayer leaders 

A community ought to have more than one or two rabbis or main teachers. We could partner around adult learning or spiritual guidance, by sharing ourselves individually with each other’s synagogues, by team teaching, or by conducting our own chavrutot or Kolel in a “virtual fishbowl.” We could try workshopping Divrei Torah together. 

For synagogues that are meeting for services online, we could have clergy swaps and teach regularly to each other’s communities. Or Synaplex-style offerings, where one of us leads the yoga service, one the Torah discussion, one the regular service. After the pandemic subsides, the technology exists for us to do this in different rooms in our existing facilities too; all it takes is a tablet or laptop and a monitor or projector to have some of the Synaplex led from a different place. 

2. Collaborations that create critical mass or economies of scale 

Some aspects of Jewish education, such as learning Hebrew, are hard to do when there are only so many qualified teachers and when small groups and schedules are so hard to coordinate. Hebrew skills are the ideal lab for online Jewish education. Language learning is not as inherently relational as other areas of meaning and values. A group of synagogues could collaborate not on an entire school, but on Hebrew learning, especially for those who don’t want to or can’t come in person.  

We could invest in great teachers and create an academy with tutorials and small groups, learning for special needs, video and audio resources, credit for high school students, and adult Hebrew. In the past, online Hebrew classes have been too expensive for most synagogues to buy from the specialist providers. It’s time to do this on our own together, or in partnership from the ground up with an entity that has expertise and infrastructure and has wanted a wider base in congregations. 

We could pool our resources to hire musicians, artists, scholars-in-residence or consultants. They could work with or teach groups across our collaborating communities. They could rotate through our communities when that becomes possible, or they could help us create virtual connections between our members.  

Some aspects of existing synagogue life take staff and volunteer time out of proportion to what is needed, and often chew up our volunteers. There have been efforts to share back office functions in the past that haven’t taken off. What about sharing the treasury and bookkeeping functions of several synagogues? 

3. Collaborations that create connections among people in separate communities 

We talk about the global Jewish people. Now is an opportunity to build relationships, through small groups who share common interests or histories. Sustained groups for social purposes or mussar; groups that come together around a topic with a master teacher. Some of these are opportunities for efficiency as well – a particular synagogue might have two people interested in meditation or a book club, not enough for a group, but together we might have many. 

Next Steps 

Such collaboration does require extra work up front, and it would have to begin now as we plan and budget for 2021-2022. The first step is to find each other if anything in this paper makes sense to you. Then it’s a matter of clusters of us finding the first one or two specific things to try together, in groups of two to five congregations. We’ll be doing that at meetings coming up in the next two weeks. 

One model might be the Jewish Emergent Network. For a while I’ve been shopping around what I’ve called with tongue in cheek the “Jewish Pareve Network”, among non-hip, non-urban, non-new synagogues. Yet pareve is not what I have in mind. Collaborating would mean committing to specific projects, giving the collaborative a tentative name, and budgeting existing dollars and staff time. Outside consultants yes, but very carefully – the partners need ownership and commitment. Seed money from outside yes, but very little – the model needs to sustain itself soon as a benefit to each partner organization. I would love to see independent Jewish musicians and artists as partners from the ground up and not just as contractors paid for specific services. The ethos, the work, the commitment, and the business model have to align and come from the grassroots. 

So, are you intrigued? If so, sign up here for a group conversation and let’s see what’s next. 

My appreciation to Ariel Moritz from the Center for Rabbinic Innovation for working with me to flesh out next steps together.

The Beginning of Exodus and the Events of the Week

The Torah contemplates something parallel to the national leadership dynamics situation we are judging right now, about the relationship between the president’s words and acts and the actions of the rioters. Thanks to Rabbi Aryeh Klapper for directing my attention to a source on this. I’m linking his shiur (lesson) on the text, but I haven’t listened to it yet (I will, but it’s an hour!). So the take on the text here is mine and we’ll see how it tracks Rav Klapper’s.

This week’s Torah reading in Jewish communities is the beginning of the book of Exodus. Chapters 1-2 are about the progression from Pharaoh’s oppression of the Israelites to slavery to the murder of baby boys, and then about resistance. Rabbi Moses Nachmanides (medieval Spanish commentator) lays out an interpretation of what the Torah text presents us.

Nachamides taught that Pharaoh had the whole project of enslavement and murder in mind at the start. But he did not begin that way specifically because his people would have recoiled at that, and Pharaoh was constrained by the willingness of his people at a given moment. So first he proposed a corvee, a small forced-labor tax, because his people would have regarded that as common and acceptable behavior toward foreigners.

Then according to Nachmanides, Pharaoh approached the midwives serving Israelite mothers behind closed doors about killing newborn boys, so that even mothers giving birth and arranging for a midwife wouldn’t know what might happen. When that didn’t work, Pharaoh next move was to say to his whole people that they should throw baby boys into the Nile. The Torah says Pharaoh commanded, and Nachmanides says Pharaoh spoke in a more common way, because he didn’t want to assign the task to any specific official. He did not want the act to be associated with his regime specifically, but with the people as a whole. By now they were willing to do things publicly they were not willing to do at first. Nachmanides posits that Pharaoh was also preserving his right to disavow any specific act. If an Israelite father would come to a local official about his own baby, Pharaoh would invite the father to offer proof and then punish the killer himself.

But Nachmanides says that eventually this set of winks became impossible and Egyptian mobs began to storm Israelite homes in search of babies. That was the situation in which Moses’ mother Yocheved knew to give birth in secret and hide the birth and the child, and that’s what led eventually to the acts of resistance involving midwives, Moses’ sister Miriam, and Pharaoh’s own daughter.

Nachmanides is pointing out that there is more to leadership responsibility than accountability for explicit orders. There is more than what is said out loud, clearly, or publicly. There is a complex feedback dynamic between the leader and the group. The group sometimes constrains the leader; the group can amplify the leader’s general direction in ways of its own that are sometimes predictable and sometimes not; the group has its own reality that is not the same as the regime; there are resisters both inside and outside. It’s worth sitting with the Torah’s story and this kind of interpretation on its own, and then thinking and talking about how it might speak to us right now.

What is the moral responsibility of the leader? Is the group responsible only for its own actions, or for anything about its leader as well? These moral responsibilities of leader and group aren’t identifical but overlap in some way. These are what we should be thinking about, from each of our positions as Americans, partial or substantial supporters or opponents of the president, citizen-judges of what happened this week and what ought to happen going forward.

Medicine and Chicken Soup (The Day After)

Medicine, and chicken soup. When you’re sick both help you get better or at least feel better, in different ways.

 

My medicine yesterday was gathering for prayer in the evening, saying some psalms and a prayer for the country and singing together with others on Zoom.

 

My chicken soup, though, was actually a whole lot of civic activity in my Wednesday, all of it previously scheduled.

 

I started off in a conversation with someone I hadn’t met before, an Israeli Orthodox teacher and scholar. We were “fixed up” by a mutual friend. He was looking for someone with a different perspective on Judaism to speak with, because he felt that too many in his world wouldn’t do that. It was a terrific conversation that we’ll pick up next week. Among many other things, we discussed a classic passage in the Talmud about disagreement when “these and these are both the words of the living God.”

 

At noon I chaired the monthly meeting of the Nashua Area Interfaith Council. We gather across some profound religious difference, as clergy and lay leaders from congregations, as nonprofit leaders who are steeped in religion.

 

In the evening I helped facilitate a public meeting about the goals and vision of the new master plan for the City of Nashua. I got to help officials from City Hall, and talk in a small group with people who are connected to city government and news media. We talked about what an ideal community looks like on the neighborhood and city level, not just concepts but what it looks like as infrastructure and buildings and transportation.

 

In between I met with colleagues and teams within the synagogue, discussing goals of education and especially interconnection for the next 4-6 months.

 

What’s your medicine and your chicken soup right now?